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Physical Review Letters

Atomic Interferometer Based on Adiabatic Population Transfer

Martin Weitz, Brenton C. Young, Steven Chu

Published Nov 7, 1994• 201 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate an atomic interferometer based on the transfer of population between two ground states via adiabatic following using a nonabsorbing "dark" superposition state. This type of interferometer promises to be useful for precise measurement of the photon recoil energy and also for large area atomic interferometers since it allows transfer of a large number of photon recoil momenta to the atoms with high efficiency. In preliminary experiments, we have obtained a coherent transfer efficiency of 95% with transfer of photon momenta and 98.4% with no transfer of momenta. Over 140 photon momenta have been transferred coherently to the atoms.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.73.2563

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We demonstrate an atomic interferometer based on the transfer of population between two ground states via adiabatic following using a nonabsorbing "dark" superposition state. This type of interferometer promises to be useful for precise measurement of the photon recoil energy and also for large area atomic interferometers since it allows transfer of a large number of photon recoil momenta to the atoms with high efficiency. In preliminary experiments, we have obtained a coherent transfer efficiency of 95% with transfer of photon momenta and 98.4% with no transfer of momenta. Over 140 photon momenta have been transferred coherently to the atoms.
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We demonstrate a novel type of cesium atom interferometer which uses a combination of a microwave ground state transition and momentum changing adiabatic transfer light pulses as the atom optical components. It is the first atom interferometer where the mechanism which forms the internal superposition plays no part in spatially splitting the atomic wave packets. The coherence length of the atom source is found by measuring the spatial correlation between the two interferometer arms. This allows us to determine the temperature of the atomic ensemble.